Distinctly Montana Magazine

51 w w w. d i s t i n c t l y m o n t a n a . c o m Maybe, then, it would be the unlikeliest aviator of all, the young Cromwell Dix- on, who at 19 was barely more than a child and, at the time, the youngest pilot ever. Dixon's youth and his unlikely accomplishments were a great story eagerly consumed by the readers of papers across the country, who saw in him an aviator's version of the American dream; he had built his first "flying bicycle" at 14, and flew it at the St. Louis Expedition, among other venues. By the time he arrived in Montana, he even sported a sponsorship from the Curtiss Exhibition Company. Slight, with an unassuming face hidden under checkered flat hats, Dixon had almost certainly been a child prodigy. According to stories about him, he invented little clockwork toys as a child, setting them loose on the lake to putter and move around. Like so many of the earliest aviators, he cut his teeth on ballooning, creat- ing a silk airship filled with hydrogen which was led by a pedal-powered propellor. He named it the Moon, and he performed in the sky while his sister did vaudeville on the ground at the Louisiana Purchase Expedition. Eventually, the Moon would burn up in a fire. He would build another, and even win an award in ballooning before he would switch to airplanes. He received his pilot's license in August of 1911, only one month before his date with destiny. Or would it be James C. "Bud" Mars, a man with many accomplish- ments as a flyer? This was the man who gave Emperor Hirohito his first plane ride, and had become only the eleventh licensed pilot in the coun- try. Not the least of his feats was being the first person to fly a plane at the Montana State Fair. Though he crashed on the first day, he survived to make demonstrations of flying in a twenty-mile-an-hour wind, and an attempt at the Continental Divide. He fell short, landing in Magpie Gulch after flying 21 miles. The next day he tried again but hit a downdraft and clipped a boulder with the propellor. Again, he survived, after a daring rescue by a detail of soldiers from Fort Harrison, who were also kind enough to carry the plane to the road. He made no more attempts. The city of Helena, grateful for the entertainment and displays of der- ring-do, threw him a dinner. The menu was duck, which as writer Frank W. Wiley points out, "was selected as being symbolic of flying." No, it wouldn't be Mars, who would live long enough to look back at his reckless aviation days from the distance of a few decades, perhaps with a mixture of fear and awe at the things he'd done so long ago.

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